Habemus Papem

The Roman Catholic Crurch has a new Pope. As I write this he has just emerged onto the famous balcony at the Vatican to give the Urbi et Orbi blessing.

Cardinal John Ratzinger from Germany has been elected Pope and has taken the name Benedict XVI. (Damn, those Wiki people are fast!)

In the preamble to the blessing he described himself as "a simple, humble worker in God's vineyard". Certainly his choice of name, as is traditional, will have a significance. The last Benedict, the fifteenth, elected in 1914, was widely thought of as a moderate after the hardline papacy of Pius X. It may well be that this Pope intends to soften some of the more conservative currents in the Church, for instance curbing the hardline Opus Dei movement. It is also likely that the new Pope's choice of name is intended to hark back to his predecessors outspoken opposition to war. With the papacy vacant upon Pius X's death on 20 August, Benedict XV made a speech on the Church's position and duties, emphasising the need for neutrality and promoting peace and the easing of suffering. After he was elected Pope in the conclave that followed that speech, he organised significant humanitarian efforts (establishing a Vatican bureau, for instance, to help prisoners of war from all nations contact their families) and made many unsuccessful attempts to negotiate peace during the Great War including the Papal Peace Proposal in 1917 and an encyclical pleading for international reconciliation, Pacem Dei munus.

Benedict XVI officiated at the mass for Pope John Paul II and was the Cardinal who announced his death to the world. He had also been Prefect of the Congregation for The Doctrine of The Faith. As a Cardinal, he even had his own fan club.

The Congregation for The Doctrine of The Faith is the oldest of the nine curia. It's purpose as set out by John Paul II is "to promote and safeguard the doctrine on the faith and morals throughout the Catholic world: for this reason everything which in any way touches such matter falls within its competence." Historically, it was closely allied to the Inquisition. As Prefect personally appointed by John Paul II, the new Pope has presided over a rather more hardline attitude to human sexuality. On one occasion a priest was chastised over works which did not fit the orthodox pattern and told to revise the books accordingly.

Father Vidal, the offending author, was reminded of the view of the Church that masturbation is "objectively intrinsically evil", of the Church's positions on contraception and in vitro fertilization which he questioned and was given this passage about his thoughts on homosexuality:

The author holds that the doctrine of the Church on homosexuality possesses a certain coherence, but does not enjoy an adequate biblical foundation (28) and suffers from significant conditioning (29) and ambiguities.(30) It reflects the defects present “in the entire historical construct of Christian sexual ethics”.(31) In the moral evaluation of homosexuality, the author adds, one must “adopt a provisional attitude”, formulated “from the perspective of inquiry and openness”.(32) For the person who is irreversibly homosexual, a coherent Christian commitment “does not necessarily lead to the rigid morality of either becoming heterosexual or total abstinence”.(33) These positions are incompatible with Catholic doctrine, according to which there is a precise and well-founded evaluation of the objective morality of sexual relations between persons of the same sex.(34) The degree of subjective moral culpability in individual cases is not the issue here. (emphasis mine)

In 2002 the Congregation produced an edict (which was not made public) which banned transsexuals from entering consecrated life, orders expulsion of all current transsexual consecrates, and orders church workers not to change baptismal records or otherwise accommodate transsexual worshippers.

So, if I were guessing - which I am - then I would say the new Pope may well be more outspoken against war and aggresive foreign policies but will stick to the hardline on sexual morality.